Porn: the great identity interrupter no one wants to talk about

Written by Genspect parent Lynn Chadwick.

Helena, a detransitioned woman with a large following on Twitter, recently posted an excellent thread expounding on the relationship between porn and the growth of the gender phenomenon among teens and young adults. This thread has its fingers precisely on the pulse of youth culture, describing how teens are affected by the explosion of easily available and ever more exploitive pornographic content.

“I’ve been ranting and raving against porn a lot more lately because every day it’s becoming more clear to me how much the normalization of extreme and grotesque online porn has played a role in the gender phenomenon in teenage boys and girls.

-Helena

On teen boys, Helena remarks:
“I can only speak from the female perspective but one can’t help but notice that there’s also a sharp increase in teenage boys thinking they are girls, and that many of them have highly erotic reasoning for this identity, a noticeable number (having) perceptions of what a ‘girl’ is and what makes them a ‘girl’ is often based in very outlandish fetishes and erotic ideas that have become much more prevalent with the mainstreaming of extreme pornography.”

“To girls who do not want to be sexual objects, who do not want to be sexually tortured, who do not want to become porn, but are gaslit into regurgitating that it’s all so cool and empowering…the idea of being a ‘woman’ under this conception is repulsive.”

We at Genspect share Helena’s concerns. As she says:

“Young people now are exposed to pornography often times before their puberty even begins. Their first introductions to sexual sensation, fantasy, dynamics between men and women in mature contexts, and more developmental milestones are within
the confines of extreme online porn.”

View the original thread here.

Also read about social media’s impact on mental health and body image.

Image credit: Andrew Neel, Pexels